The team said that the software, which was released in October on Notre Dame’s Office of Technology Transfer, was developed because they wanted the methods behind iris recognition to be clearer to laymen.

“Iris recognition is very accurate; [current methods] can reach 99.99 percent accuracy,” Jianxu Chen said, reports the Ndsmcobserver. “However, that is based on some ‘black box’ method. People without expert knowledge on image processing can not understand what is going on there. … We wanted to make it visualizable and interpretable by humans.”

The university newspaper notes that the software, which was released in October on Notre Dame’s Office of Technology Transfer, was developed by computer science and engineering graduate student Jianxu; Duda Family professor of engineering Patrick Flynn; computer science and engineering professor Danny Chen; and former computer science and engineering graduate student Feng Shen.

The developers also said that they wanted humans to be involved in the identification process:

Jianxu said he believes it is important that the results of iris recognition tests be interpretable by humans, even if their new software is not currently as accurate as more common, current methods.

“Their accuracy may be around 99.99 percent — ours is maybe 97 – 98 percent. However, the benefit is that we want humans to judge the correctness. We can bring our result to humans,” Jianxu Chen said. “If you give this picture to an FBI officer, it will mean nothing to them. However, if you bring [the results of the new recognition software] to them, after some training, they can do this matching reliably.”